Dr Melissa Highton

A talk at LCS2018 (search for this tag in the blog).

Speaking from a dual role as Edinburgh University’s Director of IT and Vice-Principal of Online Learning, Melissa discussed how Edinburgh is moving towards an ‘opt-out’ policy for LC. Opt-out means that by default, all lectures at the institution will automatically be recorded unless a special case is put forward which provides for an exception.

Edinburgh have been rolling out facilities for LC, with 100 teaching rooms fully ready, 200 more coming online this summer and the final 100 coming next year. This roll-out had been planned and announced but was reported in the student newspaper under the headline “All Edinburgh lectures to be captured from 2017.” The mis-understanding caused some complaints from students whose lectures were not yet being captured. This highlights a theme across the talks: students will increasingly come to expect lectures to be captured and may come to feel poorly served by institutions or individual departments which do not provide LC.

University of St Andrews

2 May 2018

I attended “LCS2018” in St Andrews. This afternoon-long symposium featured presentations by academics from a number of Scottish HEIs on the topic of Lecture Capture (LC). Various aspects were considered, including policy, implications, evidence and possible future directions. Several speakers related their own teaching experiences using LC and discussed implications for good practice.

I will post short pieces about each of the talks using the blog tag “LCS2018”.

Two members of the Maths Division, Rachael Carey and John McDermott, attended the ninth British Congress of Mathematical Education (BCME) in Warwick.

BCME 9 is described as “a celebration of mathematics education attracting delegates from every phase (early years through to university) and aspect (teaching through to research, policy and public engagement), as well as high profile plenary speakers.”

With over 500 delegates, 350 papers / sessions and seven high profile plenary speakers, this four-yearly event is the largest Mathematics Education Conference in the UK.

Various talks delivered at the conference will be highlighted on this blog using the tag ‘BCME’

Prof Mason has been teaching university mathematics for 40 years and during this time he has extensively investigated how to teach and learn mathematics effectively. He led the Open University’s Centre for Mathematics Education for fifteen years and has published numerous useful textbooks about maths educations that have become standard texts for students and lecturers.

This talk examined many of the ways in which the examples and ‘model solutions’ we provide to students might be more or less helpful to them, perhaps not working in the way that we expect! A number of techniques for engaging students within a session were discussed and even used during the talk.

Deductive reasoning and proof is one of the hallmarks of mathematics, and is an important factor in distinguishing mathematics from empirical sciences. Fluency in calculation, including symbolic manipulation in algebra and calculus, sit alongside deduction, reasoning and problem solving. “Core pure mathematics” is that essential amalgam which is universally studied by all mathematics, science and engineering students. It starts with traditional algebra, trigonometry and calculus, culminating with De Moivre’s theorem and its consequences while stopping short of real analysis. Presentations of core pure mathematics often contain little explicit “proof” beyond formulaic proof by induction, but it is where proof starts for pure mathematicians. Core pure mathematics contains a key activity “reasoning by equivalence”. This is reasoning and is key in many of the deductions at this level, but it is very close to a calculation. Indeed, in many situations it can be treated formally as a calculation. This talk will look at the interplay between calculation and reasoning, with a focus on automatic assessment. To what extent can we automate the assessment of reasoning now, and where are the limits of automatic assessment in the future?